The Book Behind Oppenheimer

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I’ve always been curious about what it feels like for an author to see their work translated into another medium. The question seems particularly interesting with a film like Oppenheimer, the biopic directed by Christopher Nolan that opened in theaters this week. It tells the life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” and is based on a mammoth, Pulitzer Prize–winning 2005 biography that took 25 years to research and write. American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is more than 700 pages long; at first glance, it’s difficult to imagine how a book this granular about a subject this complex became a movie. Sadly, Sherwin passed away two years ago, but Bird was able to have the uncanny experience of “meeting” Oppenheimer while visiting the set of Nolan’s film. I talked with him about this encounter and about his book’s path to Hollywood.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

Bird and I spoke over the phone a day before the film’s release. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: How are you feeling?

Kai Bird: Well, my head is spinning a little bit. It’s very weird. This book came out 18 years ago. Where was everyone then?

Beckerman: Well, you did win the Pulitzer Prize. So you can’t say that it was ignored.

Bird: That’s true. I can’t complain. But, you know, it got on the paperback-best-seller list last week. It never made it on the best-seller list back then.

Beckerman: It took a long time for it to be picked up and adapted.

Bird: Well, the book was optioned. But, you know, years went by, and nothing happened. So we were very lucky when I suddenly got a phone call in September of 2021, and I was told that Christopher Nolan wants to speak to me. I didn’t realize it then, but looking back at all his other work, he’s really the perfect director for this book. He’s always been interested in time and space and memory, science and science fiction. So it makes perfect sense that he could be attracted to a book about a guy who was a quantum physicist.

Beckerman: So the shift to film felt pretty seamless to you?

Bird: The way Marty [Sherwin] and I both thought about the book—and this would be true of any potential film as well—was that it might be an interesting story to follow the making of the atomic bomb, but that if that’s all there was, we wouldn’t be spending all these years—25 years—on it. What gives the story its arc is both the triumph of [Oppenheimer’s] achievement in Los Alamos but then the tragedy of what happens to him nine years later, when he’s brought down from being America’s most famous scientist to becoming a nonentity, humiliated on the front pages of The New York Times. His loyalty to the country is questioned. That’s what makes the story really interesting. And so, when I first had a meeting with Nolan, he was not sharing the script with me at that point. He said he works confidentially, although he’d done a whole draft already. He works very fast. I told him I thought it was important to focus on the trial. And I think he was relieved to hear me say that, because when he showed me the screenplay a few months later, it really is a lot about the trial.

Beckerman: Were there aspects of the book that you thought would be particularly difficult to communicate in film without the benefit of hundreds and hundreds of pages?

Bird: The quantum physics. This was also a struggle in the book, because it’s so complex. But actually, Nolan really attempts to explain quantum or give you a sense of the music of it. He develops a good analogy in the film. He has Oppenheimer walking through an art gallery in the 1920s, when he’s studying quantum, and he’s looking at Cubist pictures done by Picasso. And he’s staring at them, and he’s seeing the quantum in Picasso’s images. That’s not specifically in the book, but, you know, Oppenheimer’s mother was a painter and an art collector. She bought early van Goghs and several Picassos, so it’s entirely appropriate.

Beckerman: Did you learn anything about filmmaking through this process?

Bird: I saw the film for the fourth time last night. And each time I see it, I see layers that I didn’t see on the first occasion. I hear some of the dialogue that I missed on previous occasions, because it is very fast-paced. Nolan is really quite interesting as a filmmaker, I think, precisely because he’s not trying to bring you along. He’s not trying to make sure you understand everything. He’s leaving little clues throughout the visual experience that he doesn’t explain. So, for example, if you know who the physicist Richard Feynman is, he is portrayed in the film, but he’s never identified. But on several occasions, you see this young man banging furiously on a bongo, and that’s Feynman.

Beckerman: And if you know, you know!

Bird: Exactly. He wants people to leave the theater with questions: Oh, who was that? And questions about, you know, McCarthyism, living with the bomb, and why did that happen to Oppenheimer? Was it just or unjust? He’s not giving you the answers. And he does that with the whole very weighty issue of the decision to actually use the bomb, which is still controversial history.

Beckerman: I know that you went to visit the set while they were filming. I’m curious if you could tell me a little bit more about what that experience was like, just the uncanniness of it. And, you know, meeting Cillian Murphy, who played Oppenheimer.

Bird: It was very bizarre. When I met Cillian, he was being introduced to me after shooting a scene, and I shouted out, “Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Oppenheimer. It’s such a pleasure to meet you. I’ve been waiting all these years.” And then we had a five-minute conversation. And I told him I thought it was interesting how well he had captured Oppie’s voice. Oppenheimer’s voice was always very soft-spoken. It’s the kind of voice that makes you want to lean forward to make sure you’ve caught every word. And each word is pronounced very meticulously. And he speaks in whole paragraphs. Cillian’s response was Oh, well, I’m glad you think so—but, you know, we try not to imitate the voice; we try to simply capture the spirit of it.

Beckerman: Well, that seems a pretty apt description of adaptation when it works well, as it sounds like it did in this case.

Bird: I just think I’m a lucky, lucky author.

What to Read

The Rain God, by Arturo Islas

An exquisite multigenerational novel by Islas, a pioneering Chicano writer, The Rain God follows the Angel clan along the Texas-Mexico border, where descendants of the stern and pious Mama Chona hold one another in a complex familial embrace. Born in El Paso in 1938, Islas became, in 1990, the first Chicano to publish a novel with a major New York press, but died one year later at age 52 of AIDS-related complications. The novel’s matriarch was a young woman in Mexico when her firstborn, a brilliant university student, was gunned down in San Miguel de Allende during the Mexican Revolution. The Angel family is thrust north to the desert. Readers receive an intimate glimpse of this web of children and grandchildren, friends and neighbors. In vivid realist scenes, this masterwork of American literature touches on themes of border consciousness, queerness, and the inescapable finality of death. — Kali Fajardo-Anstine

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